Home-plate umpire Tom Hallion maneuvers to get a good view of Stephen Strasburg during his June 8 debut.
A great article from of all places the Wall Street Journal, on the difficulties umpires face dealing with the Stephen Strasburg phenomena.
Judging by the picture shown above, he is equally difficult for batters to deal with.
That pitch is sending the initial, visual stimuli to the batter, "THAT 100 MPH FASTBALL IS COMING RIGHT AT YOUR HEAD, GET OUT OF HERE!!!" Then it turns out to be a knee-buckling curve ball. And the poor batter has only about 0.40 seconds to determine the pitch and it's inevitable destination, all the while suppressing the survival instinct. Even then he has to deliver the bat to the anticipated destination at the right time, in the right place in order to make solid contact.
Talk about an unenviable task....for the batter and the umpire. It's just a lot of fun for fans to watch quality major league hitters turn to jelly-legged blobs of putty in Strasburg's hand.
I think the comparison to Dwight Gooden and others are going to turn out to be valid. This kid really seems to have the goods.
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How to Call What You Can't See
By DAVID BIDERMAN
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704198004575310961357883580.html?mod=WSJ_hp_editorsPicks_4
Since his debut with the Washington Nationals, Stephen Strasburg has displayed the kind of pitching repertoire that makes baseball historians scramble for their notebooks.
His four devastating pitches (fastball, chanegup, curveball and sinker) have such extreme break that it's nearly impossible to predict where they will cross the plate. He has already struck out 22 batters in just over 12 innings.
MLB Photos via Getty Images
Home-plate umpire Tom Hallion maneuvers to get a good view of Stephen Strasburg during his June 8 debut.
But here's what separates Mr. Strasburg from the vast majority of precocious arms: He's so good he makes the umpires miss.
Thanks to a system called Pitch f/x, which uses digital cameras to track the trajectory of every pitch in major-league ballparks, it's now possible to measure whether a pitch was a strike or a ball and, more to the point, whether the home-plate umpire made the correct call.
According to a consensus of umpires, a good umpire will make one bad call on a pitch every two innings—or about four or five per game. But in Mr. Strasburg's first start, on June 8, Pitch f/x indicated that the home-plate umpire, Tom Hallion, missed seven calls in only seven innings. By contrast, Mr. Hallion only missed two calls in five-plus innings for the opposing pitcher, Pittsburgh's Jeff Karstens.
In Mr. Strasburg's second start, the system said home-plate umpire Brian O'Nora missed six calls in fewer than six innings. Mr. Hallion and Mr. O'Nora couldn't be reached for comment.
"I've known guys who couldn't sleep the night before they had to ump a pitcher like that," said Don Denkinger, a major-league umpire for almost three decades.
Former all-star pitcher Rob Dibble, a Nationals broadcaster for MASN, said he watched almost every one of Mr. Strasburg's starts in spring training and said he was fooled repeatedly—Mr. Strasburg's pitches moved so much that it was impossible to get a good feel for them. When Mr. Strasburg threw a curve in the first inning of his first major-league game, Mr. Dibble thought it was a strike even though the umpire called it a ball. "I knew these umpires would not call these early breaking balls because they've never seen them this good," he said over the air.
Mr. Dibble said it's not unusual for umpires to need adjustment periods with new starters because they're not used to how they pitch, but that a pitcher as unique as Mr. Strasburg demands a longer timetable. "He demands a huge learning curve," he said.
The problem dates to Mr. Strasburg's college days, before he was picked No. 1 overall by the Nationals. In November 2008, before Mr. Strasburg's final season at San Diego State, Jim Paronto, the coordinator of baseball officials for the Mountain West Conference, said he always made sure any umpire working one of the kid's games was a good balls-and-strikes guy. "He's a special kind of challenge," he said.
When watching Mr. Strasburg pitch, Mr. Paronto said, the first thing that would go through an umpire's mind is, "Wow, did the ball really just do what I think it did?"
Mr. Strasburg isn't the first phenom who has had this problem. Former umpires and managers say baseball immortals like Jack Morris and Dwight Gooden got similar treatment during their careers because their pitches moved too much.
Former New York Mets manager Davey Johnson managed Mr. Gooden for seven seasons, including his rookie and sophomore years, when he struck out 544 batters and won 41 games. Mr. Johnson said Mr. Gooden had robot-like control of his pitches, but umpires were often overwhelmed by their movement.
To make things more difficult, Mr. Gooden would turn his body during his windup in a way that made it harder for umpires to see the ball as it left his hand. "No question about it—umpires can struggle seeing pitches," Mr. Johnson said. "They're human like the rest of us."
Early in his career, Jeremy Bonderman of the Detroit Tigers was dogged by inconsistency. He'd pitch well one day, terrible the next, mixing horrible pitches with great ones. His coach at the time, Bob Cluck, said he thinks part of the pitcher's problem was that umpires weren't familiar with the immense amount of movement on his breaking pitches—so they would call them balls when they'd actually landed in the strike zone.
Mr. Cluck said the sharp lateral movement on Mr. Strasburg's pitches will probably make them similarly difficult to grade. "Those are the toughest pitches to call," he said.
Former umpire Dave Phillips, a 31-year major-league veteran, said Mr. Strasburg is a walk in the park compared to another wildly talented pitcher: Hall-of-Famer Nolan Ryan. For all his greatness, Mr. Ryan was known for his lack of control, famously holding the records for most strike outs of any major leaguer and the most walks.
This made him especially tough to ump, Mr. Phillips said, because his pitches often ended up streaking far outside the strike zone. When they saw Mr. Ryan was pitching on a given day, Mr. Phillips said the reaction was universal: "Oh, God."
Steve Palermo, a major-league umpire supervisor who called balls and strikes for 14 years, compared Mr. Strasburg's pitches to former greats like Bert Blyleven and Mr. Ryan. "Some of the veteran umpires have seen it before, but you have to know it's going to be different than normal" he said.
The key to working with a pitcher with so much talent, Mr. Palermo said, is to force yourself to wait an extra second to make a call. A home-plate umpire's cardinal sin, he says, is to make a judgment too early, then watch helplessly as the ball jumps in a different direction at the last moment.
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